MS 841 (1908) - A Neglected Argument - Text and Fragments

The word 'God,' so 'capitalized' (as we Americans say,) is the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium: in my belief Really creator of all three Universes of Experience.

Some words shall herein be capitalized when used, not as vernacular, but as terms defined. Thus an 'idea' is the substance of an actual unitary thought or fancy; but 'Idea'—nearer Plato's idea of ἰδέα,—denotes that whose Being consists in its mere capacity

for getting fully represented, regardless of any person's faculty or impotence to represent it.

'Real' is a word invented in the XIIIth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not. Thus, the substance of a dream is not Real, since it was such as it was, merely in that a dreamer so dreamed it; but the fact of the dream is Real, if it was dreamed; since if so, its date, the name

of the dreamer, etc., make up a set of circumstances sufficient to distinguish it from all other events; and these belong to it, i.e. would be true if predicated of it, whether A, B, or C Actually ascertains them, or not. The 'Actual' is that which is met with in the past, present, or future.

An 'Experience' is a brutally produced conscious effect that contributes to a habit, self-controlled, yet so satisfying, on deliberation, as to be destructible by no positive exercise of internal vigor. Take for illustration the sensation undergone by a child that puts its forefinger into a flame with the acquisition of a habit of keeping all its members out of all flames.

A compulsion is 'Brute' whose immediate efficacy nowise consists in conformity to rule or reason.

Of the three Universes of Experience familiar to us all, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them, saves their Reality. The second Universe is that of

the Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being consists in reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections redoubtable until they are closely and fairly examined. The third Universe comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects; especially, between objects in different Universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign,—not the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but, so to speak, the Sign's Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving